Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 17:29:20 EDT Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Todd Day Subject: Red-necked Grebe Summary (crude and long) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Greetings, Either because I have far too much free time, or because I was keeping track of the Grebe invasion to help Marshall Iliff with his North American Birds column, I've ended up with a spreadsheet gleaned from MDOsprey and VA-Birds for all the Red-necked Grebe reports in Maryland and DC. That said, I'm well aware that there are a bunch of people out there with grebe sightings that I don't know a thing about. There are three counties that I have zero sightings listed in (Caroline, Somerset, and Wicomico). People like Jim Stasz didn't report a whole lot of birds to the listserv, so I suspect he and others like him can fill in some holes, and have several new locations. The way I tracked it was tedious, but pretty thorough. Each time a grebe or grebes was reported from a location, I put it in the sheet. This gives me about three hundred entries, but the majority of them are duplicate locations, just on different days. What it allowed me to do was keep track of locations by county, peak count for any single location, and provide a basis for a very rough guess at how many were in the county. Mind you, I realize that's a stretch, as these things fly and move up and down rivers. A few other caveats. One, I don't know Maryland all that well. That said, if a location has a couple different names, I might have them listed as two different locations, which would alter the number of locations. Also, some places straddle county lines, and with some help from Marshall, I've tried to put them where they belong, but I make no claims that they're perfect. Most troublesome areas are along the Potomac in Washington and Montgomery Counties. The District also presents its own set of problems, but I've explained that below. Two, Baltimore. I've split it into the county and the city, though I'm not 100% sure on the locations birds were reported from. For the county locations I have Loch Raven Reservoir, North Point State Park, and Back River. For the city I have Fort McHenry and Rocky Point Park. Three. I've taken most of the birds reported from the Virginia shore that were likely in Maryland or DC waters and included them here, though not the birds that were actually in Virginia, which there are a few locations where that is the case. Four. I might have missed a few things that were on the listserv. Mostly I would have missed birds tucked into posts with subject lines that didn't seem to be a report but something else. I tried to open just about every piece of mail from MDOsprey, but I'm sure I missed a couple. On the list that follows I have each county followed by the number of locations within the county, the date of the first report, the date of the last report, the high count of birds from any given location, and an estimate of the high count of birds that were in the county at once. Again, the latter is a pretty meaningless value. Any questions, corrections, complaints, please let me know. Try to keep them directed to me as opposed to the entire listserv please. Allegany: Three locations. 1 March through 22 March. High count at a single location was 4. Estimated total was 8-11 birds. Anne Arundel: Six locations. 12 February through 13 April. High count at a single location was 7. Estimated total was 20 birds. Baltimore City: Two locations. 14 Feb through 14 Mar. High count at a single location was 13. Estimated total was 13+. Baltimore County: Three locations. 3 March through 27 April. High count at a single location was 9. Estimated total was 9+. Calvert County: Five locations. 1 March through 12 April. High count at a single location was 4. Estimated total was 9+. Carroll County: Two locations. 23 March through 8 April. High count at a single location was 3. Estimated total was 4. Cecil County: Eleven locations. 2 March through 28 April. High count at a single location was 9. Estimated total was at least 20 birds. Charles County: Six locatons. 8 March through 12 April. High count at a single location was 9. Estimated total was at least 18 birds. Dorchester County: One location, one report. 16 March through 16 March. Report was of one bird (Arnold). Frederick County: Two locations (I'm a bit vague here as many were listed as variations of the mouth of the Monocacy, so I put them all down as one, plus a Lilipons sighting). 2 March through 18 March. High count at a single location was 4. Estimated total was 5. Garrett County: One location (holding out on us Jim?). A single report of one bird on 22 March (Holbrook and Brighton). Harford County: Four locations. 1 March through 20 April. High count at a single location was 11. Estimated total was 22. I suspect that Harford is a bit sloppy on my part. Howard County: Two locations. 22 March through 12 April. High count at a single location was 1. Estimated total was 2 birds. Kent County: Five locations. 2 March through 6 April. High count at a single location was 2. Guessed total was three birds, probably very low. Montgomery County: The mother lode. Eleven locations. Many locations were along the Potomac, and I treated all the mentioned locks as a location, as well as where tributaries dump into the Potomac. As a result the locations may be a bit inflated. 14 February through 23 May. High count at a single location was a whopping 116. I hesitate to give a value to the number of birds in the county at once, but I'd guess 150-200. Prince George's County: Four locations. 8 March through 14 April. High count at a single location was 8. Estimated total was 10+. Queen Anne's County: Six locations. 8 March through 24 April. High count at a single location was 7. Estimated total was 10+. St. Mary's County: Four locations. 19 February through 16 April. High count at a single location was 2. Estimated total was 3 birds. Talbot County: Four locations. 2 March through 6 April. High count at a single location was 1. Estimated total was 2 birds? Washington County: Eight locations. 1 March through 13 April. High count at a single location was 14. Estimated total was at least 20 birds. Worcester County: Nine locations. 23 February through 12 April. High count at a single location was 13. Estimated total was at least 25 birds. District of Columbia: Many locations along the Potomac, plus Washington Channel, the Tidal Basin, Georgetown Reservoir, and Anacostia Park. 1 March through 24 May. High count at a single location was 23. How many were on the river is anyone's guess. So I'll guess 40. Cheers, Todd - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Todd Day Jeffersonton, VA Culpeper County Blkvulture@aol.com - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================